Federal agencies have a new resource to help them make content and services available anytime, anywhere, and from any device–the federal Mobile Code Catalog sponsored by the Digital Services Innovation Center.

This catalog is hosted on GitHub (more on why that matters in a moment). Here, agency developers looking to jump-start their efforts can find source code for native and web projects from a variety of sources: federal agencies, other governments, and third-parties in the private sector.

More than code

It’s not all about code, though. Any successful mobile program needs to be able to test the quality and the accessibility of their apps. The catalog also includes test scripts to help your agency validate the functionality and accessibility of their app. You can also find links to data, APIs and other federal developer pages.

The Mobile Code Catalog is hosted on GitHub for a reason. In addition to the form that agencies can use to submit their open source project or resource, the catalog itself can be “forked.” Forking the catalog is the process of making a copy of it so improvements can be made without affecting the original copy. Those improvements can then be submitted to us through what’s called a “pull request.” If everything’s in order, we’ll incorporate those improvements with just a few clicks.

What’s next

This catalog has been initially populated with the cooperation from several agencies, but the work is not done. Over the next few months we will be hosting events but we need you.

Are you a government mobile innovator with some code you’ve developed to share? Submit your code.

Are you a developer who wants to tweak one of the existing government apps or modules? Fork the content and make a pull request.